I’ve just returned from my (socially distanced) holiday in the South West of England. Having left South Yorkshire on the 29th August, my trip started with a two day stop at Glastonbury, where I got chance to climb the Tor and see the colourful characters in the town centre.
I recently entered a street photography shot into a couple of competitions. One was the APOY 2020 ‘City Life’ round and the other was a community contest on Photocrowd. This is the image I entered:
Recently Digital Photographer Magazine ran a Summer Landscapes competition on Photocrowd. Entrants were encouraged to “make use of shadows” and “look for striking but natural colour contrasts”. I entered one of my recent images from Mam Tor in the Peak Disctrict and I’m delighted to say that I finished in the top 10%!, finishing 272nd place out of 3483 entries. That’s actually in the top 8% – but Photocrowd award a badge for being within the 10% bracket.
It’s really encouraging, and I feel like my landscape photography is definitely going in the right direction. My next goal is top 5%!
The challenge set by 52frames for week 28 was to have someone else edit your image. It was an interesting concept, and a bit different from challenges in previous weeks. I don’t have too many photographer friends, and those that are don’t use RAW editing software. Therefore I hit the Reddit forums to try and find some people that could help me complete the challenge.
I found a subreddit called Edit My RAW, and posted a request along with two RAW files that I had taken in the woods earlier that day. Conditions were average, and the shots weren’t particularly special, but I did quite like them, and I’m pleased to say I got some fantastic edits from a number of users. 27 in total!
I show all of the images, as well as the chosen image that I submitted to 52frames in my video.
In my video from 21 June, I showed you how I captured an image that I was hoping to enter into the Amateur Photographer of the Year Award (APOY) 2020. The round I was entering was called ‘Keep on Moving’ and was about capturing motion. I headed to the woods with my friend, Ant, who is a keen mountain biker, and I used a panning technique to capture his movement as he made some jumps. The idea was to keep Ant locked in motion with the camera, so that he appeared frozen, while the background was blurred.
I wasn’t 100% satisfied with my results on the day. Although I felt I had executed the technique well, and my background was nicely blurred, my subject, Ant, wasn’t as sharp as I would have liked. Nevertheless, after another couple of weeks, I didn’t feel I had captured anything better and I entered the image anyway.
So last week I was surprised to find out that my image finished in the top 25%. Higher than that in fact. I got a badge for finishing in the top 25%, but I actually finished in the top 19% – 79th place out of 417 entries. Considering I wasn’t that happy with the final image, I think that wasn’t a bad result!